Debt Collection
by Right What Is Wrong
Summary: In Deathly Hallows, Harry finally demanded repayment of Wormtail's life debt. But what if he'd done that three years earlier? (Oneshot.)


**Author's Note:** I was going to put this in Force Interrupt, but decided it was long enough to stand on its own.

* * *

 _The cloaked man was now conjuring tight cords around Harry, tying him from neck to ankles to the headstone. Harry could hear shallow, fast breathing from the depths of the hood; he struggled, and the man hit him — hit him with a hand that had a finger missing. And Harry realized who was under the hood. It was Wormtail. "You!" he gasped._

All at once, Dumbledore's words at the end of last year came back to him.

 _"Pettigrew owes his life to you. You have sent Voldemort a deputy who is in your debt... When one wizard saves another wizard's life, it creates a certain bond between them... and I'm much mistaken if Voldemort wants his servant in the debt of Harry Potter... This is magic at its deepest, its most impenetrable, Harry."_

"You can't do this!" he screamed.

Wormtail flinched and checked the tightness of Harry's cords, shutting his eyes as though the absence of sight would be the absence of hearing, too.

"You _can't! You owe me, Wormtail!"_

Wormtail went still.

"What is this?" came a low, hissing voice from the bundle of robes Harry had thought was a baby. Harry decided suddenly both that he knew what was within and he did not want to see it.

"You owe me," he repeated, gritting his teeth. "You. Owe. Me. I saved your life. That means something, magically, doesn't it? I reckon it doesn't mean you can sacrifice me to my worst enemy. I prevented that from happening to _you_."

"You wouldn't - be sacrificed, exactly," Wormtail choked out, looking as though the words were being dragged from him; despite the frigid night, sweat rolled down his face. "Not - sacrificed - precisely -"

" _Liar!_ " Harry shouted in his face, and the man recoiled. "I _heard you!_ I heard you begging him to use any other wizard! I heard it _all!_ "

What color remained drained from Wormtail's face.

" _What is this?_ " hissed the voice again. "You lied to me, Wormtail! You _lied!_ You told me the boy was-"

"-Nothing to him?" Harry suggested brightly, and a scream of rage came forth from the pile of robes. At once, a bolt of pain split his skull; it subsided into a dull, but no less painful, ache and began to mount again.

"Traitor! Traitor! _Spy!_ You have been carrying word to Potter all along-"

"My Lord, My Lord, I swear I was not!" Wormtail sobbed. "I-"

"I don't want you calling him My Lord anymore," Harry said softly, shutting his eyes against the pain in his skull. "No, that won't let you off. It's just a starter." Wormtail whimpered.

"How dare you betray me, Wormtail! Was this your plan all along? Were you sent by Potter? Has this, all along, been your scheme to get back into Dumbledore's good graces? Have-"

"It wasn't, it wasn't," Wormtail muttered as the voice from the bundle continued to rant, and when Harry forced open his eyes against the pain, he saw the man cover his face with his hands as he shook from head to foot. "I-"

" _Nagini!"_ Harry heard the bundle hiss, and his eyes flew open to see the snake rear up to Wormtail's side, while the man still stared stupidly towards the bundle, and -

"THE SNAKE!" Harry shouted in turn, jerking his head in its direction, and Wormtail's head whipped to the side just in time for him to dodge its strike; the fangs scraped his cloak, but did not go through. The same did not go for Wormtail's returning fire, which pummeled the giant serpent with such obvious force that Harry was shocked that it did not go down. Reeling, it looked between him and Wormtail for a moment, then went for the man again; he used some sort of spell to yank it by the tail into the air, then flung it up into the sky and... left it there. If Harry squinted, he could just make out it thrashing furiously, attempting to reach Wormtail but lacking the length needed to touch its prey.

There was a sort of sick justice in Voldemort's snake suffering the same fate as the Muggles at the Quidditch World Cup.

The bundle let out a wordless scream of rage.

"That makes twice," Harry said, and Wormtail turned back to him, looking as though Harry were infinitely more dangerous than the snake. "And, actually, that was a lovely idea he had. I _was_ just going to tell you to kill him. An eye for an eye, right?" Cedric - "But he can't die, can he? And you've done much more to me than kill _one_ man." Wormtail understood his meaning immediately; a sob broke forth from him, and, for a moment, Harry saw guilt cross his face.

"James," he croaked. "You don't understand - he would have killed me -"

"Oh, I understand, Wormtail," Harry said with a grin that was half a grimace. "Take him to the Ministry - to the _Department of Magical Law Enforcement_ , not his old friends." The screaming from the bundle began anew.

"And what can they do to me, Potter? Do you imagine any can kill _Lord Voldemort_ , boy? I, who have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immor-"

"Kill?" Harry said sweetly. "Wouldn't dream of it. I _would_ like to know how you plan to fish your soul out of the stomach of a Dementor, though."

For the first time, Harry felt something other than pain spike through his scar - an icy, overpowering feeling that nearly shocked him out of his skin. A moment later, he recognized it. Fear.

He couldn't help himself. He laughed. "Oh, get that look off your face," he said to Wormtail, who looked about to faint. "You won't necessarily be joining him. Why, look at Karkaroff... Headmaster of his own school. All he had to do was give up the names of everyone he knew... And that will be easy for you, won't it, Wormtail? You've some expertise in treachery..."

"They'll kill me, they'll kill me," Wormtail sobbed. "Sirius and Remus, they'll kill me..."

"I saved you once," Harry said coldly. "Is it my fault you repaid me by going running to Voldemort?" Wormtail only sobbed harder. "Betray your master to the Ministry, as you betrayed my parents to him. Betray everything you know. Sell out everyone you can to save your hide, just as you did back then." He set his jaw. "It won't bring back them - or the dozen Muggles you killed - or Bertha Jorkins - or Cedric Diggory - but it's the most you _can_ do, rat."

"Bertha Jorkins wasn't me, it was My L-" Wormtail halted abruptly. After a few seconds, he managed, "Him," pointing at the currently-silent bundle.

"How nice," Harry said. "Now, free me. Do as we agreed. Oh, and give evidence of Sirius's innocence while you're at it."

" _He'll kill me_ ," Wormtail croaked, and Harry was overwhelmed with disgust. A moment later, he wondered: what _precisely_ were the restrictions on the debt? Would it make sense to use a bond formed by having saved a man's life - no matter how despicable a life - to send him to his death?

"If I must," Harry snapped, "I'll do my best to preserve your miserable skin. If that's the price of calling in the debt - _fine_." He gave an ugly laugh. "Worked for Dumbledore and Snape, didn't it?"

Wormtail shook from head to toe, but slowly, painfully, he reached into his cloak. Up flashed a dagger, and down came the ropes around Harry. Rubbing himself to restore circulation, Harry shivered in the cold night air and looked toward where Cedric's corpse lay.

"Wormtail! Wormtail, you traitor!" The screams dragged his attention away from the body - the body that, so recently, had been a good, brave man - and he saw Wormtail shambling slowly and painfully toward the bundle. "You cannot obey him! You cannot believe him! You have no place else to go! You -"

But Wormtail bent over the heap of robes and took something out of his cloak, and the screams were soon muffled. It did nothing to help Harry's renewed headache, though. With a flick of Wormtail's wand, the ropes that had bound Harry zoomed over and wound themselves around the piled robes; Wormtail stood, holding the squirming mass under his left arm. It reminded Harry of nothing so much as a bundle of worms. A few seconds later, Wormtail shuddered with pain and shifted the mass to his right arm, thrashing with his left arm as though trying to detach a rabid wolf's jaws from his forearm.

"The cup," he said to Harry over his shoulder, and for a moment Harry was bewildered. "The Triwizard Cup - it's a Portkey. Multiple-activation, I mean. We-" Wormtail looked as though he wanted to be silent, but something forced him onward. "We - planned for My L- _his_ servants to come through, once he was fully restored-" He swallowed hard. "It will take you back," he said. "To Hogwarts. As - as it should have, had we not -"

"Tampered with it," Harry finished. He looked toward where it lay gleaming in the darkness. It sickened him that such a tawdry, meaningless thing should have seemed so significant, less than an hour ago... That...

"Fine, thanks," he said curtly, forcing such thoughts out of his mind, and pointed his wand at Cedric's corpse. " _Mobilicorpus_ ," he forced out, and Cedric's body rose up as easily as the snake had. "Are you going to just leave it there?" he asked, looking up at the thrashing entity in question. It must have been tireless to _still_ be straining against the spell.

Wormtail gave a pained little chuckle. "I think - well - it's - not an ordinary snake," he said in a simpering, self-depreciating little voice. Harry hated it. "You'll understand if I - er - leave it for more qualified people -"

"Is that the motto of your whole life?" Harry said in disgust, and began walking towards where the Cup lay, Cedric's body hovering along with him so that he could take hold of him - _it_ \- the moment before he took the Portkey.

" _Wait!"_

Harry turned back to look at the man, dim curiosity and overwhelming contempt warring within him. "What is it now?" he ground out.

"Moody - he's - ah - not Moody," Wormtail stammered out. "Barty Crouch Junior - Polyjuice -"

"Barty Crouch Junior?" Harry demanded. "But he's _dead_!"

Wormtail let out a high, strained little chuckle. "So am I, aren't I?" Unfortunately, Harry was forced to concede he had a point. "I - I don't know who died in Azkaban, but Junior's been with Senior all along - Imperius, can you imagine? _One_ Death Eater was under it, at least!" He gave another nervous little laugh and continued, "B-but Bertha - poor woman, poor, poor woman, it was terrible, really - but Harry, I had no choi-"

" _Save it_ ," Harry snapped, and Wormtail cringed.

"Well, she came by at the wrong time and found him alive," the man continued. "Senior Obliviated her, but I -"

"Bumped into her at a country inn and Voldemort did the rest," Harry filled in, not wanting to have to hear Wormtail's whining voice for an instant longer than necessary.

"How do you - I - Well, you aren't going to tell me, are you? Yes. Yes, that's how we found out. So we - Well - Turnabout is fair play, isn't it? I know you agree, Harry -"

" _Go on_."

"Ah! Yes - So we Imperiused Senior and freed Junior, and then - well -" A trace of an actual personality contaminated Wormtail's ingratiating expression. "Inconstant vigilance."

Harry felt as if he'd been punched in the gut. "So he's been your agent at Hogwarts all along."

"Yes."

Harry shook his head slowly. "There's nothing I hate more than a Death Eater who walked free," he repeated. "There's nothing I hate more than a _Death Eater_ who walked free... There's nothing I hate more than a Death Eater _who walked free_." How very clever of Moody - no, _Crouch_ \- to let the listener project their own emphasis onto the sentence.

But then, it was bitterly apparent Voldemort's servants were not lacking for cleverness.

"I - I had to tell you," Wormtail stammered. "Junior - he may not be Moody at his prime, but he's no slouch -"

"Thanks," said Harry. Wormtail nodded, his face pale. When Harry turned away, he heard the _crack_ of Disapparation.

He steeled himself, then seized onto Cedric's corpse with one hand and the Cup with the other.


End file.
